Maybe that’s why the President just appointed a self-described “alpha-male” who has a special fondness for Hooters as America’s new “Tourism Envoy.”

Thanks to our friend Rick Antonson for the kind shout out regarding his recent keynote at the Board Leadership for Destinations Symposium

Every once in a while, a member of the Committee suggests a new way to explain what we do and why it is so vital to the Quality of Life for our communities. And one of those moments happened yesterday.

Whenever an elected official spouts off that destination marketing isn’t important because everyone already knows and loves us, I’ll typically mutter under my breath, “then why do you litter the city with yard signs every election cycle?

(Our) air-traffic control system, in many places, still depends upon Stone Age technology that's often older than the flight controllers using it. - Bill Clinton 1995

My youngest was roughly 18 months old when, in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment, she reached out to touch the flame of a candle.

61% of travelers now say they’d rather stay in paid lodging than on that Murphy Bed or inflatable mattress

And to think, it only took those NYC TV executives 50 years to figure out the rest of the country was hungry for their own time in the spotlight.

To paraphrase the Capital One spots, what will you be dropping this New Year’s Eve?

I guess the lesson here is, when you see a campaign get flamed, wait a few years and try it again.

As the CMO of Connecticut Tourism said, “Our goal was never just to market pizza, it was to ignite a movement. We took something humble and universal, pizza, and turned it into an invitation to see Connecticut differently.”

A funny thing happened. Voters said “no” to taxing visitors in a number of those communities. The light bulb has begun to flicker on. Sophistication as to the delicate balance of tourism and quality of life is beginning to be realized in some of these communities.

News from the Trump Administration’s Department of Transportation last week announced a new campaign intended to bringing civility back to the friendly skies.

Now that Congress has quit screwing around with the shutdown and the Epstein Files, it’s time to get back to work. And back to work they went on Wednesday by introducing the VISIT USA Act, an attempt to restore the boneheaded cuts to this nation’s Destination Marketing Organization, Brand USA.

The blog platform we've used since 2006 has announced they will be going dark at the end of this month...taking with them all 4,200 posts and the over 3,000 comments that some of you have offered over the years. Kaput, gone...vanished.

Remember when Marketing pundits declared Direct Mail to be dead? Except research was actually showing that Gen Z consumers were still finding value in the messages. The rationale?

Americans are eating out more, if reservations on OpenTable are an indicator. Those reservations are up 12%.

But not in DC.

An op-ed piece in USA Today suggests that Destination DC's Elliott Ferguson has the worst job in Tourism (at least today). The President has sent in the National Guard and has called the city "a nightmare of murder and crime."

Most Americans who consume news about the economy have heard expert after expert quote how much tourism trade we've lost since the President suggested that Canada should be America's 51st State.

When the Wisconsin Tourism industry was arguing to establish a Labor Day School Start, the lobbyist for the School Administrators attempted to assert that it was hotter in June and cooler in August.